MINIX 3.4 RC6 Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: MINIX 3.4 RC6 Released

The release of MINIX 3.4 is inching closer with the availability now of its sixth release candidate...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MINIX-3.4-RC6-Released

[Uqbar]

... apart of the fact that RC6 is 100+MB larger than RC5!

[uid313]

If anyone wonders who Andrew Tanenbaum is, he is the guy living in the shadows of Linus Torvalds.

The big, expensive, commercial, proprietary Unixes of old were out of reach for normal people. It was only for big companies and universities.
So Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX as a mini Unix system that people could run on their home PC.
But it was proprietary software so it never got anywhere.

Then Linus Torvalds made Linux and released it as free software and everyone loved it, it got adopted and a community built around it and it took off.
If Andrew Tanenbaum had made MINIX free software then things would have been different, Linus would have never created Linux.

But Andrew Tanenbaum made MINIX proprietary software and now he lives in the shadow of Linus. With no riches, fame, admiration or recognition.

[kpedersen]

With no riches, fame, admiration or recognition.

In the academic circles Tanenbaum is a much bigger name than Torvalds. Especially because of his work on Micro kernels.

But yeah I do agree. Proprietary software is worthless software in the long run.

[Uqbar]

I think you are misunderstanding the cases.

Tanenbaum wrote a Unix-like OS from scratch for academic purposes: he needed an OS to be studied and used by his students and PhDs.
Torvalds wrote a Unix-like OS not from scratch for his own interests, amusement and "why not".
Different purposes, different choices, different licenses.
Both Minix and Linux are neither closed source nor proprietary software, with MINIX being currently covered by BSD license.
It used to be proprietary, for v1.
Tanenbaum is a well known professor in OS (and networking).
Torvalds is a well known hacker, programmer, coordinator, whateverelse-or in OS (and source code management).
Besides the flamewars (that were not personal), they respect each other for their work.
I will endlessly thanks both of them, though.
Finally, I don't think Torvalds got much richer than Tanenbaum, nor more admired and recognized.
He got far more famous, though.

[gukin]

Ah Minix, long before Linux I had an Amiga 2000 with a bridge board, essentially an 8088 PC that could talk to MFM hard disks, with a 20 MB hard disk. I had it partitioned with five meg for DOS, five meg for Minix and ten meg for Amiga stuff. This was in the mid to late 80s and minix fit into less than five meg and ran on 512K of memory. It had

Andrew's book on operating systems was instrumental in my understanding operating systems; real ones not that stupid monitor from MS called DOS.

[Holograph]

I do not understand the point of the post bashing Tanenbaum. WTF?

[danieru]

Then Linus Torvalds made Linux and released it as free software and everyone loved it, it got adopted and a community built around it and it took off.
If Andrew Tanenbaum had made MINIX free software then things would have been different, Linus would have never created Linux.
But Andrew Tanenbaum made MINIX proprietary software and now he lives in the shadow of Linus. With no riches, fame, admiration or recognition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6JzYel1ne4

[danieru]

Keep up the good work! Hooping for USB support. Or was just Hurd that didn't support USB?

[nf24]

Its 2017 and when will it support USB flash drives?